''The War Against Cliché'' (2001) is an anthology of essays, book reviews and
literary criticism
Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Th ...
from the British author
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels ''Money'' (1984) and ''London Fields'' (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir '' ...
. The collection received the
National Book Critics Circle
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an American nonprofit organization ( 501(c)(3)) with more than 700 members. It is the professional association of American book review editors and critics, known primarily for the National Book Critics C ...
award in 2001.
Title
The book takes its title from one of Amis' essays, an
encomium
''Encomium'' is a Latin word deriving from the Ancient Greek ''enkomion'' (), meaning "the praise of a person or thing." Another Latin equivalent is ''laudatio'', a speech in praise of someone or something.
Originally was the song sung by the c ...
to
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
's novel ''
Ulysses
Ulysses is one form of the Roman name for Odysseus, a hero in ancient Greek literature.
Ulysses may also refer to:
People
* Ulysses (given name), including a list of people with this name
Places in the United States
* Ulysses, Kansas
* Ulysse ...
''. Amis characterizes that novel as Joyce's "campaign against cliché". Amis writes,
To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.
Contents
Like Amis's previous collection '' Visiting Mrs Nabokov'', the book is composed of many pieces written over the course of the author's career, beginning in the mid-1970s as a journalist and following up to his period of recognition as one of Great Britain's most acclaimed novelists. Among the many authors considered are
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth ...
,
Anthony Burgess
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, (; 25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993), who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer.
Although Burgess was primarily a comic writer, his Utopian and dystopian fiction, d ...
,
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only wr ...
,
Iris Murdoch
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch ( ; 15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her fi ...
,
Elmore Leonard
Elmore John Leonard Jr. (October 11, 1925August 20, 2013) was an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. His earliest novels, published in the 1950s, were Westerns, but he went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thri ...
and
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophicall ...
.
Many of the essays also touch on pet topics of Amis's, such as
chess
Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...
,
poker
Poker is a family of comparing card games in which players wager over which hand is best according to that specific game's rules. It is played worldwide, however in some places the rules may vary. While the earliest known form of the game w ...
, football,
cue sports
Cue sports are a wide variety of games of skill played with a cue, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth-covered table bounded by elastic bumpers known as .
There are three major subdivisions of ...
,
masculinity
Masculinity (also called manhood or manliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles associated with men and boys. Masculinity can be theoretically understood as socially constructed, and there is also evidence that some behaviors con ...
, and
nuclear weapons
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...